[dbrannan]

Perhaps iTunes 11 needs to index your library over again before the speed improves?

[high5ths]

Possibly... though Activity Monitor (or top) doesn't show anything suspicious. If I stop audio from playing, iTunes drops to about 4% CPU. (And mdworker doesn't appear to be working overtime either.) With the Column Browser open, searching in iTunes causes a leap to 100% CPU until the UI updates. Column Browser closed, searching causes a momentary leap, but not to 100%, and obviously it's over very quickly.

There's clearly something up with the coding of the Column Browser.

[zerovox]

I doubt it, it seems to be using the same plist format(essentially, a glorified xml file) as previous versions.

[hokkos]

the plist is only for external app, internally it uses a sqlite.